An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal” reports a study on a double X-ray source in the early universe cataloged as MG B2016+112 which could be composed of two supermassive black holes whose image is distorted by a gravitational lens. Cristiana Spingola, Daniel Schwartz, and Anna Barnacka started from a survey obtained by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to examine the double object observed. This is an unprecedented situation because from the Earth we see it as it was when the universe was about two billion years old with the two components separated by only 650 light-years. At present, it cannot be ruled out that it’s a single supermassive black hole and one of its jets of materials whose image was strongly distorted by the gravitational lens.

A series of ten articles to be published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” reports the results of the activity of the LoFar network with its 70,000 antennas with unprecedented details of various galaxies at radio frequencies. A team of astronomers has published these results consisting of astronomical images obtained by making the most of the LoFar network’s capabilities. This made it possible to obtain images twenty times sharper than the previous ones generated by LoFar.

An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” reports a study on the feeding process of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy NGC 1566. A team of researchers led by Almudena Prieto of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) used observations conducted with the Hubble Space Telescope, the VLT, and the ALMA radio telescope in Chile to be able to visualize filaments of interstellar dust that separate and subsequently head towards the supermassive black hole, approaching it in a spiral trajectory that eventually leads them to be swallowed. Those filaments could obscure the center of many galaxies with active galactic nuclei.